


There is Nothing for Me But to Love You

by iksnilits



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Beaches, Character Death, M/M, Non-Graphic Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-21
Updated: 2013-05-21
Packaged: 2017-12-12 12:11:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/811456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iksnilits/pseuds/iksnilits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Happiness is fleeting. Sam and Dean found it once, for a little while. Now, Dean's just lost and tired.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There is Nothing for Me But to Love You

**Author's Note:**

> This would not have been even half as okay without the lovely Stella - find her on tumblr at [trazodone](trazodone.tumblr.com) and on here at [blackPlague](archiveofourown.org/users/blackPlague). She is incredible. Go read all her gorgeous fic. 
> 
> Warnings for past, non-explicit child abuse. John is verbally and physically abusive. 
> 
> I apologize for the gross misuse of blockquoting. I am horrible with HTML and I can't for the life of me figure out indenting. 
> 
> Title from 'The Way You Look Tonight'. Songs referenced are 'Speak Low' and 'Summertime' by Billie Holiday. 
> 
> Thank you all for giving this a try! You are wonderful.

# There is Nothing for Me But to Love You

“Evening,” the guy says across the railing that divides their decks. Dean tips his head out of the inky space beyond his crumbly cedar railing and into the hazy golden glow of the porchlights.

“Hey, man,” he answers, and it comes out crusty because those are the first words he’s said in days. His neighbor leaves it at that, and Dean turns back to the night air.

The stars are twinkling sharp and malicious, taunting Dean with memories of him and Sam stretched out on the hood of the Impala. Somewhere in the middle of Kentucky, they’d cooled off in the grassy breeze and watched the swirls of orange sky fade to stars.

> _Sam took Dean by the elbow and waved his arm floppily in the general direction of the night sky. ‘See that?’ he asked. ‘That’s the constellation Triangulum—it represents the division of the universe between Cronus’ three sons. Zeus got the heavens. Poseidon got the sea, and Hades got the underworld. That’s one explanation, anyway.’_
> 
> _‘You giant, raging nerd,’ Dean said affectionately, and listened while Sam mapped out the stars for him._

Dean’s stomach clenches with cold sorrow and loneliness and words bubble up, acidic bile in his throat.

“You know much about stars?” he asks his neighbor.

“No,” the man says. “But I am constantly dizzied by their magnitude.”

“See those two bright ones?” Dean asks, leaning over the railing and dotting them with a fingertip. “Look down, you can connect them with the others and if you squint it’ll look like two figures. That’s part of Gemini. The Greeks said it represented the myth of Castor and Pollux.”

The man squints at Dean’s finger, tilts his head. He nods at Dean. “Go on.”

Dean pulls his hand back, drapes it over the railing.

“Well, Castor and Pollux were brothers, the sons of Zeus. They were the protectors of sailors. Castor was mortal. When he died, Pollux begged Zeus to give Castor immortality. So Zeus did, and he reunited them in the heavens together.”

Dean catches up with himself, and trips on the last words. The man is silent, regarding him with a look that says nothing at all.

“Sorry,” Dean mumbles, his throat hot and raw.

“Please,” the man says, wrapping his arms around himself. “Do not apologize.”

They lean out into the salty velvet night, until Dean’s forearms protest the paint chips biting into them and he goes back inside.

He wakes up around five the next morning and sees his neighbor still outside, tucked into a scrawny beach chair with anemic blue-striped cushions. His dark hair is flopped over his eyes, and Dean can’t tell if he’s sleeping or if he stayed up to beat the night.

+++

Dean’s days are filled with a monotonous consistency. He works at a mechanic’s shop at the edge of town, and when his hands are busy he can’t find room to think about Sam at all. It’s a relief, because otherwise there isn’t a single minute in the day that he can just forget. Sam was his reason for most things. It’s not a question of the size of the hole his little brother left. It’s a question of if there is even anything left.

Sam was the one who wanted the beach bungalow-thing. Dean had cursed the sandy dirt that settled into a thin film over the Impala while Sam bounded around the grassy lawn.

> _‘This is perfect, Dean. C’mere—you can see the ocean from the porch! God, it smells so good.’_
> 
> _‘You know we’d share the garage and property with another resident, right, Sammy?’ Dean said, in a last-ditch effort to live anywhere else, anywhere he didn’t have to make his baby share a garage with some pretentious asshole’s hippie wagon. Sam’s face was shining with easy joy and Dean realized that he couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Sam smile like that._
> 
> _‘Right,’ he grumbled, into the salty-light sunshine. ‘We’ll live here. But if anything happens to Baby, it’s your fault.’_
> 
> _‘Dude,’ Sam laughed. ‘It’s gonna be awesome. Come on; let’s look around back. I think I saw a good spot for a garden.’_
> 
> _‘If anything can even grow here,’ Dean grumped. But, he admitted grudgingly, if anyone could coax life out of the sand, it would be his little brother._

It was eerily normal. Idyllic, even. Dean should have known it wouldn’t last. Sam volunteered at the elementary school, coming home with glitter in his hair and paint on his face, and he would study at the kitchen table in the warm glow of early evening while Dean made them dinner.

> _‘Dean. You have to actually use the vegetables,’ Sam said, fixing him with a stern look. Dean rolled his eyes and peevishly added them to the skillet. There were lots of vitamins in beef, he argued. Protein._
> 
> _‘Yeah, but you can’t call it a stir-fry if it’s all meat, Dean,’ Sam said, exasperated._
> 
> _Dean just huffed, turning back to the stove, and Sam unfolded his legs from beneath the table to go stand behind him._
> 
> _“More peppers, please,” Sam said, tucking his chin into the crook of Dean’s neck and batting his hand toward the cutting board._
> 
> _“Get off, you moose,” Dean said sternly, fighting a smile. “You’re getting glitter in our dinner.”_

The small apartment, with its bright windows and everything smelling like ocean and sunshine, was home. More of a home than anything else they’d ever known, anyway.

+++

They’d unofficially met their other neighbor on a Thursday. Sam and Dean had rounded the corner of the house and nearly collided with a man in a rumpled white dress shirt. He’d carried a giant bag of alfalfa sprouts, some of which dropped onto his loafers as he shoved a handful in his mouth.

"How do you do," he’d said, tipping his sprouts gallantly before continuing toward the garage at a breakneck pace, blue tie fluttering over his shoulder. 

“What," Dean had said intelligently.

They caught glimpses of the man here and there but they never officially met him, and Dean said firmly that no, he would not bake brownies to bring over as an introduction gift because they'd already been there for a month and it would be awkward. 

That evening, Dean finds himself outside again, and he folds himself into the creaky wooden-slatted chair next to the hideous giant fern that threatened to take over the entire deck. He’d tried to subtly dispose of it countless times, but Sam always dragged it back out, claiming that greenery was essential to an effective place of relaxation. Dean guessed that maybe if you squinted, you could imagine you were in an overgrown rainforest or something, so he gave up on trying to get rid of it, and the fern stayed.

His neighbor is on his deck too, long fingers wrapped around a chipped mug. Dean smiles tightly, nodding his head in a greeting.

“Hello,” the man says. “I didn’t get a chance to properly introduce myself. My name is Castiel.”

“Hi,” says Dean. “I’m Dean,” and immediately cringes at his awkwardness. “Did you spend the whole night out here? I noticed you early this morning.”

“Yes,” Castiel says. “I find that I am less likely to float away if I’m under the stars. I was afraid of what might happen if I went inside.”

“Oh,” says Dean. The airy twilight wraps around them, and Dean shivers in the salt-crisp breeze.

“Would you mind telling me more about the stars?” Castiel asks, his voice breaking the cricket-y lull. Dean nods, then realizes Castiel can’t see him because of the fern.

“Sure,” he says, and clears his throat, remembering.

> _‘What’s that one, Sammy?’ Dean asked, pointing at a cluster of stars. ‘That’s not anything,’ Sam said, brushing the hair out of his eyes. ‘I don’t know if it is, anyway.’  
>  ‘It’s gotta be something,’ Dean said. ‘Wanna make it up?’_

+++

It’s 7:04 pm. It’s been five days and four hours since Dean got the phone call at work, telling him to come identify his little brother’s body. He thinks it’s really fucking unfair, that his extraordinary brother could be taken from him by something as stupid as a car accident.

 _‘But Sam doesn’t even drive,’_ he remembers thinking. In the end, though, it didn’t matter anyway.

His throat itches for the familiar numbing slide of alcohol, but he can’t bring himself to pull the bottle out of the cupboards. If he does one thing right with his life, it’s that he will never let himself end up like his dad.

> _On the nights that John stumbled in, slurring and shouting, Dean knew the drill. ‘Stay in your room, Sammy,’ he said, eyes darting and frantic._
> 
> _‘Where’s my Sammy?’ John yelled, his words slow and ugly. ‘C’mere, boy.’_
> 
> _Dean braced himself in the living room doorway and kept his head down. ‘Dad, he doesn’t feel good today. Leave him alone.’_
> 
> _John scoffed. ‘Yeah? He was feelin’ good enough to ask me for money today. Said he had to pay for a trip t’ some museum.’_
> 
> _Dean shut his eyes slowly. ‘Please, don’t. Dad—‘_
> 
> _‘I work my ass off every day to put food on the table and a roof over your heads, and you still ask for more. You’ll both show me some respect.’_
> 
> _After John passed out on the couch, Dean crawled into Sam’s bed, keeping the blankets off his ribs. ‘You should have asked me for the money, Sam. I could have figured something out.’_
> 
> _Sam just cried silently, soaking the front of Dean’s shirt and whispering apologies._
> 
> _On Tuesday, John hit Sam hard enough that he coughed up blood, an obscene red smear on his thin lips. Dean held him in the bathroom, rubbing Sam’s back while he retched into the toilet, the sharp metallic tang of blood and bile persisting no matter how tight he pulled Sam to his side._
> 
> _Later, as Sam read some musty old book, spider-legs sprawled across the ratty blankets, Dean started throwing clothes into duffel bags. ‘Go get our birth certificates, Sammy. Grab the social security cards and your shots records and that knife in Dad’s drawer.’_
> 
> _Sam just sat there, taken aback. Dean took a breath, fingers clenching around the rolled-up shirt he held._
> 
> _‘You think he’s gonna stop? You think this is the worst thing that’s gonna happen? I can’t make you want to leave. But I’m sure as hell not leaving you here by yourself.’_
> 
> _‘Where would we go?’ Sam asked, pulling his legs up and marking his place in the book with a long finger._
> 
> _‘Anywhere,’ said Dean. He wrapped his fingers around Sam’s bony wrist. ‘Anywhere that’s not here. I’ll keep you safe, I promise.’_
> 
> _‘Disneyland?’ Sam joked, bumping their shoulders together, and Dean let out his breath shakily._

They had made their way across the Midwest, Dean searching out auto shops and anyone that would hire him while Sam went to school.

“I could just drop out,” Sam offered one night over cheap, greasy burgers. “It would be easier, Dean, you know it. I could get a job; we’d have more money. You wouldn’t have to worry about my transcripts and getting me into a new school every time and people asking where our parents are—“

“No,” Dean had said harshly. “You’ll stay in school.” Sam didn’t bring it up again.

They had to keep moving, Dean knew, to avoid the inevitable questions. Eventually, they’d run out of seedy apartment owners who didn’t care how old they were as long as they had enough cash. When his 18th birthday came, they stayed in a town in North Carolina long enough for Dean to squirrel away a thick wad of bills in an Altoids tin under the floorboards. But the landlord started to corner Sam into the darker hallways with his hands and eyes, and they got the hell out of there, fast.

They’d spent that August night in a grassy, open field a few miles off the highway, glad to escape the sweaty seats of the Impala. Sam stretched out on the ratty blanket they lay on.

“I want to live on the beach,” he’d said after a while, into the still-hot night air. “Want to wake up with the ocean, sleep in the sand and swim all day and never breathe the city again.”

“Yeah?” Dean turned his head toward Sam’s half of the blanket, and Sam just closed his eyes, the sheen of his hot skin lit up by the starlight. Dean reached out to slide their sweat-damp palms together. 

Sam woke up the next morning to sand and grass speeding by, Zep on the radio, and salt air in his nose. Dean looked over, a wide grin splitting his face. “Thirty more minutes and we’ll be on the beach, Sammy,” he said. Sam yelped, flailed, and planted a sloppy kiss on Dean’s freckled cheek. “Watch it, I’m driving,” Dean said, laughing, and Sam stuck his head out the window, letting out a shout that had made Dean’s heart overflow.

+++

Dean tries to slip into mindless sleep, over and over and over, but every time he thinks he’s almost there, almost adrift in the sweetness of not-thinking, Sam’s voice pipes through, loud and full of laughter. Sometimes instead of jolting upright, sweaty and panting and pressing his palms to his ears, he gets stuck in the half-conscious nightmareland of his Sam-memories.

> _One o’clock in the morning, Sam had said he’d be home by eleven, and he still hadn’t called. Dean worried his keys between his fingers, ready to take the Impala and search every grubby alleyway for a worst-case scenario, when the front door opened, squeaking on its hinges. Sam slunk through, closing it behind him and taking off his jacket quietly. Dean felt immediately, sickeningly angry._
> 
> _“What the hell, Sam,” he hissed. Sam startled, eyes wide._
> 
> _“Dean, wait. I just lost track of time—“_
> 
> _“And what? You forgot to call and tell me where you were? Goddamnit, I was worried, Sam! You can’t do that!”_
> 
> _“Can’t do what, exactly?” Sam retorted. “I can’t stay out like a normal guy? I can’t have a good time with my friends?” He flung his jacket onto the bench by the door. “I don’t need you to pick up where Dad left off.”_
> 
> _Dean’s eyes shuttered, and he turned, digging his nails into his palms. “Right,” he said quietly, as Sam toed his shoes off. “Night, Sam.”_
> 
> _Dean tossed and turned for an hour before Sam padded toward his bed, barefoot on the creaky hardwood floor. Sam’s thin pajama bottoms were slung low over his narrow hips, catching on the rough blankets as he sat on the edge of the bed. In the hazy dark, his brother was an outline against the cool white sheets._
> 
> _“Dean,” he whispered. “What I said, about Dad—“_
> 
> _Dean cut him off. “I’m sorry, Sam,” he said, low and soft, breathing in Sam’s minty strawberry-sugar heat. Sam pushed his head into the angle made by Dean’s shoulder and the pillow.  
>  “I’m sorry too,” he said sleepily, tangling his long fingers into Dean’s shirt. Dean exhaled shakily, falling asleep to the soft whuffs of Sam’s breath across his arm and the calloused heat of fingertips pressed to his ribs._

+++

Dean’s out on the deck again, watching the rolling gray storm-clouds inch through the sea.

“I’m sorry about your brother,” his neighbor says, staring unblinkingly. Dean’s skin prickles, and he pulls an arm around himself, hugging his torso. 

“Don’t,” he bites out sharply. “Just—“ and Cas’s face closes off, impassive. Dean’s chest tightens with anger and guilt and more anger because _why the fuck does he feel guilty_ , and the last thing he wants to do is continue this conversation.

So of course Cas says something bland and vaguely apologetic like, “Would you like some coffee? We’ll be rained on any moment now.”

Dean already feels like enough of an asshole, so he steps over the creaky dividing railing and follows the guy inside, where it smells like entirely too many scented candles. 

“I have tea, if you prefer,” Cas says, poking around in an obsessively organized cupboard above the sink, and Dean always says coffee, always, but for some reason he says, “Tea’s fine, thanks. Whatever you’re having.”

and he can almost feel Sam poking him in the side, saying _thought you said tea was for pussies, Dean—_

Cas smiles, starts puttering around the kitchen, and even though it’s dropped ten degrees since the clouds started coming in, Dean’s sweating sticky through his clothes. He thinks, this was a fucking horrible idea, but he can’t come up with any reason until Cas presents him with a warm mug of strawberry tea and a little smile. 

Dean can’t find any air to breathe, and he trips over his own feet backing up. 

“I should go,” he manages, and throws an apology over his shoulder before tripping out the sliding-glass door. It’s raining hard, splashing his face cool and he tries to get all the strawberry out of his nose with the wet sea air.

+++

Later:

“Hey,” he starts inanely, glancing over to Cas, who is perched on his side of the deck, engulfed in a giant cardigan with what looks to be reindeer prancing along the sleeves.

“You knit that yourself?” Dean snorts, and then cringes because insulting people to make friends might have worked in kindergarten, but now he just sounds like a dick. 

To his relief, Cas grins and shakes his head. 

“I’ll have you know it took fourteen reindeer to make this sweater,” Cas deadpans, pulling the long sleeves over his hands, and Dean’s laugh sounds rusty, even to him. 

“Anyway, about the other night—“ he starts, but Cas is quick and jumps in on the hesitation.

“Don’t worry about it. Please. I understand how things go sometimes.” Cas’s up-quirk of lips is strangely reassuring, and Dean finds himself offering up a beer and passing over the bottle opener Sam accidentally stole from a grill in Illinois. 

Beer in the evenings starts to be a regular occurence—if they happen to be outside at the same time, they’ll watch the sun sink into the ocean and roll the sweating bottles between their palms. On Wednesdays, Cas sometimes invites Dean in for his stupid cop show that’s weirdly addicting, and Dean sits on Cas’s couch, surrounded by candles and haphazard stacks of books and listens to Cas accurately predict the entire episode after five minutes. 

_I think I made a friend, Sammy,_ he thinks, and then laughs, but it catches in his chest.

+++

Dean’s out on his deck one evening, watching the slow burn of the sky, red and orange fire-clouds, when he hears the familiar scritch of needle on vinyl and the low croon of Billie Holiday pipes out through Cas’s open door. Cas steps out, balancing two drinks in one hand, the other pulling the screen door shut behind him.

> _summertime, and the livin’ is easy_
> 
> _fish are jumpin’, and the cotton is high—_

The red in the water is blinding, and when Dean turns to take the glass Cas offers, he has to squint because Cas’s lit up bright by the sun, his smile glowing golden.

“People say that the brilliant colors of sunsets are caused by pollution,” Cas says. “However, it’s really just particles in the air scattering the light rays at different frequencies. As a species, we are rather self-centered. I don’t think nature is given enough credit.”

Dean raises his eyebrows above the curve of his glass. Billie serenades them as the sky fades to match the sea, until the album ends and there’s nothing but the crackle of the record player and cricket-chirps from the weeds. 

Cas levers himself to his feet and drifts off inside. Dean hears glasses clink, the scratch of the record player—Cas flipped the album—and the music laps at his feet again, but Cas doesn’t come back out. Dean realizes it’s late, dark enough that he can’t see the ocean anymore.

> _speak low, when you speak, love_
> 
> _our summer day withers away too soon, too soon_

+++

Cas catches Dean eyeing his shelves of books one night. Dean’s trailing his fingers along the cloth-covered spines, recognizing titles.

“Do you enjoy reading?” Cas asks, pulling at the books to line them up on the edge. 

“Not as much as— not as much as some people.” Dean catches himself, turning back to the bookshelf and clamping his lips together tight to hold Sam’s name in.

> _Sam would come home with stacks higher than his head, Whitman and Dickens and crumbly-looking books Dean had never heard of before. He’d plunk himself down on the couch after dinner and homework and get completely entranced in the pages, not even protesting when Dean shoved his cold toes under Sam’s leg to warm them up._
> 
> _‘Hey, Sammy, that book’s thicker’n your dick,’ Dean said, and snickered maturely._
> 
> _‘Mm-hmm,’ Sam hummed distractedly, and didn’t look up from the page he’d buried his nose in._

+++

“Care for a swim?” Cas asks, conjuring up two beach towels and tossing one to Dean, who is struck by how Sam-like the gesture is. Sam would just throw a towel at Dean’s chest and saunter out the door, expecting to be followed down into the warm sand for some early-evening swimming.

“Nah,” Dean shakes his head. “Not in the mood.”

“Come on,” Cas prods, snapping his towel across the railing at Dean. Dean growls out a _No_ , and the harshness takes them both by surprise. 

Cas just steps back, his leather sandal slapping his heel, and shrugs, though he won’t meet Dean’s eye. Dean watches his pale shoulders bob and ripple with the waves, and goes to find something to microwave for dinner when Cas wiggles into the sand, letting his thin legs float up with each lap of the water like Sam used to do.

+++

Dean steps out of the kitchen with their coffee.

On the couch: a tuft of hair poking above the water-stained canvas sofa arm, two knobby knees bent up, quilt draped over them and that weeks-overdue Kerouac book balanced on top with long fingers pinning down the pages and he thinks

_Sammy_

he’s breathless and the sun streaming through the windows has slowed down; it pools in the folds of the old quilt, weaving slow and golden between those fingers and settling in the fluffed-up hair, and then Cas turns at his footsteps and smiles and his eyes are not hazel-blue. 

Dean sloshes half his coffee on the carpet and tries not to cry. 

_Get a grip_ , he thinks, and settles himself into the couch, half in the butt-print Sam had started to create. 

Cas sips his coffee, looking solid, and the Louis Armstrong he put on the record player is messing with Dean. He’s strung up on the trumpets—they jumble his thoughts around and make it hard to think straight. Dean feels like he’s watching himself lean over, and it’s a weird relief to escape his tired body and see-not-feel his lips press into Cas’s. Cas makes a little noise of surprise against Dean’s mouth, and he tastes like cinnamon coffee. 

Dean’s sweating. He’s too cold, but he’s sweating, and salt water slides gritty down his spine, soaking his waistband and beading up on his temples. If he closes his eyes tight enough and drifts into the trumpets he can almost imagine Cas’s hands are bigger and his lips are thinner and he tastes more like springtime, but that’s too much; he can’t bear to think that way right now. He tries to refocus on the slow slide of Cas’s mouth against his but Cas is pulling away, taking a breath and leaning back and Dean cups his palm to his mouth. 

Cas looks sad. “Don’t do this to yourself.”

“I want to,” Dean says, and even he can hear the desperation. “I do, I do want.”

“No,” Cas says. “I can’t.”

Cas pats him on the knee, trailing his fingers along the denim, and drifts toward the door. “You start this, I won’t be able to stop. It’ll be messy and sick, it won’t be good for either of us.” He gives Dean a little smile, sad around the eyes. “Give it time,” he says. “I’ll be here.”

 _However long it takes_ , he says in his little wave of fingers and cinnamon, and steps out the door. 

Dean reels on the sofa, tries to keep his hands from shaking.

+++

Dean still makes a double batch of pancakes on Saturdays. He still showers fast in the mornings to leave hot water. He finds himself renting shitty B-horror movies even though he hates them and putting extra bell peppers in his grocery basket and there are still two frazzled toothbrushes in the cup on the sink.

He’s cried, really cried, only twice: once when he saw Sam’s body and once when he realized he’d killed Sam’s whole garden by overwatering it, all the spinach leaves and tomato plants moldy and brown, and he’d dropped to his knees in the sweet dirt. 

The rest of the time, he just feels numb and cold, aching for some elusive fullness. He’d thought that maybe spreading Sam’s ashes would give him some sort of closure—

> _‘I wanna be cremated if I die,’ Sam said, as they drove by the decrepit graveyard out of town. ‘Not only because coffins are ridiculously expensive, but it would be nice to redistribute your atoms back into the system, you know? Entropy and all that.’_
> 
> _‘If you die?’ Dean scoffed. ‘What are you, Nicholas Flamel?’_
> 
> _‘I knew you read the books,’ Sam crowed triumphantly. ‘Ha! I knew it!’_
> 
> _Dean scowled around his smile._

\--but spreading the contents of the little blue box into the waves just made Dean feel like he’d lost even more of Sam.

Too often, Dean wakes up in oceans of sweat and hoarse from screaming. In his dreams Sam is dying, over and over, dying because Dean had one job and he fucked it up. In his dreams, he begs them to kill him instead, to let Sam live, because if anyone was ever good at heart it was his brother, and why should he get to breathe when Sam can’t? He had one job to do, and he fucked it up.

Dean hates how he can count on both hands the number of times he said ‘I love you’, and he tries not to think about it too much, because he knows how easy it is to get trapped in those kinds of thoughts and not come out.

He just wants one more sleep-warm Sunday morning to wake up tangled in Sam. That’s all. Just one more.

Sometimes he rolls over into the cool side of the bed, sticky in the late-night heat, and feels Sam's silky curls brushing the pads of his fingers.

"Sammy," Dean always says. "Please don't go. Stay, please, stay for me." 

Sam only ever smiles, ghosting his long fingers through the silky mess of tears and sweat on Dean's cheeks. "Tell me what I'm supposed to do now," Dean whispers. "I'm so lost. Sammy, don't go."

The other side of the mattress is always cold as it was before, no dent in the sheets suggesting Sam had ever been there, and Dean shakes, his face buried in the damp pillow.

Sometimes he catches a whiff of the strawberry-mint tea that’s still in the kitchen cupboards and has to clutch the lip of the sink until it digs into his palms to keep from vomiting.

Sometimes he curls up in Sam's sheets with his face pressed into one of his brother's old shirts, because his bed doesn’t smell like Sam anymore.


End file.
